Ben Scallan

We have annual scheduled carbon tax increases and the explicit purpose of this is to deliberately force people out of their cars.

That was actually what one transport minister said back in 2019 to make it so unaffordable to drive your car that you're forced to take a bike or public transport or get an electric vehicle or something like that.

So that is the express purpose of the policy is to hurt you and lo and behold it's hurting you.

So

Now that that's become very politically thorny for the government, they've postponed the carbon tax hike until October.

So they haven't even said that we're going to reduce carbon tax or we're not going to put carbon tax up.

They've just kicked the can down the road by a few months.

But as many analysts have pointed out by this point,

October is going to be coming into winter when energy prices are going to surge.

So you're going to be hit with a particularly large bill, bigger than you would ordinarily be hit with, just when you need energy the most.

So that's where we are now.

It's not really satisfactory so far as many of the protesters are concerned.

There are people who are calling for that, but the government is emphatic that we will not be doing that.

You know, Glen, that in Ireland we import 100% of the oil that's used on the island.

We have one oil refinery, but we don't actually generate any.

And it is estimated by independent assessors that we have hundreds of millions of barrels of oil potentially off the coast within our territorial waters

But in 2020, the government actually banned oil exploration so that you can't look for it offshore.

So that's potentially sitting there under the ground and nobody is allowed to look for it or try to utilize that.

And at the same time, we're importing it.

We don't have any nuclear power because that's something that we haven't really even discussed approaching here.